Results by title

210 books match the query 'African Studies' and 7 start with d

cover of Developing States, Shaping Citizenship: Service Delivery and Political Participation in Zambia

Developing States, Shaping Citizenship

Service Delivery and Political Participation in Zambia

Erin Accampo Hern

University of Michigan Press, 2019

At the nexus of political science, development studies, and public policy, Developing States, Shaping Citizenship analyzes an overlooked driver of political behavior: citizens’ past experience with the government through service provision. Using evidence from Zambia, this book demonstrates that the quality of citizens’ interactions with the government through service provision sends them important signals about what they can hope to gain from political action. These interactions influence not only formal political behaviors like voting, but also collective behavior, political engagement, and subversive behaviors like tax evasion. Lack of capacity for service delivery not only undermines economic growth and human development, but also citizens’ confidence in the responsiveness of the political system. Absent this confidence, citizens are much less likely to participate in democratic processes, express their preferences, or comply with state revenue collection. Economic development and political development in low-capacity states, Hern argues, are concurrent processes.
 
Erin Accampo Hern draws on original data from an original large-N survey, interviews, Afrobarometer data, and archival materials collected over 12 months in Zambia. The theory underlying this book’s framework is that of policy feedback, which argues that policies, once in place, influence the subsequent political participation of the affected population. This theory has predominantly been applied to advanced industrial democracies, and this book is the first explicit effort to adapt the theory to the developing country context.
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cover of Development Detoothed: Ugandan Girls and the Making and Unmaking of a Global NGO Campaign

Development Detoothed

Ugandan Girls and the Making and Unmaking of a Global NGO Campaign

Erin V. Moore

University of Chicago Press, 0

An in-depth examination and critique of girls’ empowerment campaigns in Uganda.

In Kampala, Uganda’s capital and largest city, to “detooth” is to take a man’s money with promises of sex and intimacy.  In this highly engaging book, anthropologist Erin V. Moore uses detoothing as a metaphor to capture the ways that many in Uganda, where unemployment rates are staggering, get access to resources from prosperous international NGOs. 

Based on over a decade of ethnographic research in Uganda, Canada, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, the United States, and at the United Nations, Development Detoothed focuses on the world’s largest campaign to “empower” adolescent girls in the global south, which aimed to reach hundreds of millions of girls. Moore follows the campaign’s money and messages around the world, through what she calls the “development supply chain,” from NGO headquarters to staff training workshops, UN offices, government agencies, and community-based organizations.

From this uniquely multisited perspective, she explains how billions of aid dollars earmarked for girls ended up in the hands of men who ran these organizations. Rather than merely document ironic outcomes, however, Moore shows how people inventively navigated the development industry’s many injustices, arguing that as young Ugandan women pull development’s “teeth” they effectively challenge broader ideas about power, money, and masculinity.

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cover of Diaspora Without Displacement: The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal

Diaspora Without Displacement

The Coloniality and Promise of Capoeira in Senegal

Celina de Sá

Duke University Press, 2025

Capoeira—a game of combat primarily developed by enslaved West Central Africans—has become an icon of both Brazilian national culture and pride in the country’s diasporic African heritage. Yet the sport remains less accessible in Africa itself, overshadowed in large part by participants in the Global North. In Diaspora Without Displacement, Celina de Sá tells the story of capoeira as it "returns" to the African continent through the creative initiatives of young urban professionals in Senegal. De Sá demonstrates how a new generation of African capoeiristas are taking up their own Afro-diasporic performance tradition, effectively reframing notions of diaspora and race through their social practice. Though capoeira has largely Angolan roots and the agents of return are typically white Brazilians and Europeans, the West African practitioners de Sá documents nonetheless form an exceptional relationship to capoeira that, in turn, becomes a mode of political and social consciousness. Analyzing a capoeira network across West Africa, de Sá shows how urban West Africans use capoeira to explore the relationship between Blackness, diaspora, and African heritage.
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cover of Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation

Disability and Social Justice in Kenya

Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation

Nina Berman and Rebecca Monteleone, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Disability in Africa has received significant attention as a dimension of global development and humanitarian initiatives. Little international attention is given, however, to the ways in which disability is discussed and addressed in specific countries in Africa. Little is known also about the ways in which persons with disabilities have advocated for themselves over the past one hundred years and how their needs were or were not met in locations across the continent. Kenya has been on the forefront of disability activism and disability rights since the middle of the twentieth century. The country was among the first African states to create a legal framework addressing the rights of persons with disabilities, namely the Persons with Disabilities Act of 2003. Kenya, however, has a much longer history of institutions and organizations that are dedicated to addressing the specific needs of persons with disabilities, and substantial developments have occurred since the introduction of the legal framework in 2003.

Disability and Social Justice in Kenya: Scholars, Policymakers, and Activists in Conversation is the first interdisciplinary and multivocal study of its kind to review achievements and challenges related to the situation of persons with disabilities in Kenya today, in light of the country’s longer history of disability and the wide range of local practices and institutions. It brings together scholars, activists, and policymakers who comment on topics including education, the role of activism, the legal framework, culture, the impact of the media, and the importance of families and the community.
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cover of Disputing Discipline: Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

Disputing Discipline

Child Protection, Punishment, and Piety in Zanzibar Schools

Franziska Fay

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Disputing Discipline explores how global and local children’s rights activists’ efforts within the school systems of Zanzibar to eradicate corporal punishment are changing the archipelago’s moral and political landscape. Through an equal consideration of child and adult perspectives, Fay explores what child protection means for Zanzibari children who have to negotiate their lives at the intersections of universalized and local "child protection" aspirations while growing up to be pious and responsible adults. Through a visual and participatory ethnographic approach that foregrounds young people’s voices through their poetry, photographs, and drawings, paired with in-depth Swahili language analysis, Fay shows how children’s views and experiences can transform our understanding of child protection. This book demonstrates that to improve interventions, policy makers and practitioners need to understand child protection beyond a policy sense of the term and respond to the reality of children’s lives to avoid unintentionally compromising, rather than improving, young people’s well-being.
 
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cover of Dog Eat Dog: A Novel

Dog Eat Dog

A Novel

Niq Mhlongo

Ohio University Press, 2012

Dog Eat Dog is a remarkable record of being young in a nation undergoing tremendous turmoil, and provides a glimpse into South Africa’s pivotal kwaito (South African hip-hop) generation and life in Soweto. Set in 1994, just as South Africa is making its postapartheid transition, Dog Eat Dog captures the hopes—and crushing disappointments—that characterize such moments in a nation’s history. Raucous and darkly humorous, Dog Eat Dog is narrated by Dingamanzi Makhedama Njomane, a college student in South Africa who spends his days partying, skipping class, and picking up girls. But Dingz, as he is known to his friends, is living in charged times, and his discouraging college life plays out against the backdrop of South Africa’s first democratic elections, the spread of AIDS, and financial difficulties that threaten to force him out of school.
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cover of Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal

Dying to Count

Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal

Siri Suh

Rutgers University Press, 2021

During the early 1990s, global health experts developed a new model of emergency obstetric care: post-abortion care or PAC. In developing countries with restrictive abortion laws and where NGOs relied on US family planning aid, PAC offered an apolitical approach to addressing the consequences of unsafe abortion. In Dying to Count, Siri Suh traces how national and global population politics collide in Senegal as health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate PAC’s effectiveness in the absence of rigorous statistical evidence that the intervention reduces maternal mortality. Suh argues that pragmatically assembled PAC data convey commitments to maternal mortality reduction goals while obscuring the frequency of unsafe abortion and the inadequate care women with complications are likely to receive if they manage to reach a hospital. At a moment when African women face the highest risk worldwide of death from complications related to pregnancy, birth, or abortion, Suh’s ethnography of PAC in Senegal makes a critical contribution to studies of global health, population and development, African studies, and reproductive justice.
 
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